Gerald Durrell (1925-1995) was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservationist and television presenter – several vocations packed into one restless life. Born in Jamshedpur in British India, he moved to England as a small boy after his father’s death, and in 1935 the family decamped to Corfu for four years, cut short by the coming of war. An inheritance in 1946 funded his first animal-collecting expeditions, and it was his wife Jacquie who, with money desperately tight, pushed him to write about them. The result, The Overloaded Ark, sold well; My Family and Other Animals became a bestseller and the book for which the world knows him.
The books, though, were always a means to an end: animals. In 1959 he leased a site on Jersey and founded a zoo unlike the zoos of its day – a place for study and captive breeding rather than spectacle – which passed to the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust in 1963 and survived repeated brushes with bankruptcy on the strength of his writing and fundraising. Appointed OBE in 1982, he founded the Durrell Conservation Academy in 1984, whose thousands of graduates include a director of London Zoo – an institution once opposed to his work. He died in January 1995, following a liver transplant; his ashes were divided between Corfu and his beloved zoo.
6 hours and 16 minutes
